Blue-planet media celebrate red-planet spectroscopy: Water on Mars!
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8140
The abstract for a 28 September Nature Geoscience paper ends, “Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.”
Water on Mars? Alerted by NASA, the media have taken note enthusiastically. On the morning of 29 September, the Google News search term “Mars water” yielded 42 million hits. Google’s whimsical doodle showed a smiley-faced red planet sipping water through a straw.
The paper—"Spectral evidence for hydrated salts in recurring slope lineae on Mars"—comes from Georgia Tech’s Lujendra Ojha and seven colleagues. Here’s the entire abstract:
Determining whether liquid water exists on the Martian surface is central to understanding the hydrologic cycle and potential for extant life on Mars. Recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance compared to the surrounding terrain, appear and grow incrementally in the downslope direction during warm seasons when temperatures reach about 250–300 K, a pattern consistent with the transient flow of a volatile species. Brine flows (or seeps) have been proposed to explain the formation of recurring slope lineae, yet no direct evidence for either liquid water or hydrated salts has been found. Here we analyse spectral data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from four different locations where recurring slope lineae are present. We find evidence for hydrated salts at all four locations in the seasons when recurring slope lineae are most extensive, which suggests that the source of hydration is recurring slope lineae activity. The hydrated salts most consistent with the spectral absorption features we detect are magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.
Above the Washington Post‘s front-page fold appeared the widely reproduced image that illustrates the discovery and dominates NASA’s brief, clear press release , which itself has been extensively recycled in news reports. The New York Times front page displayed the image too, above a news report headlined to telegraph why there’s so much excitement: “Liquid water, and prospects for life, on Mars.” The Times‘s opening paragraphs highlight those prospects:
Scientists have for the first time confirmed liquid water flowing on the surface of present-day Mars, a finding that will add to speculation that life, if it ever arose there, could persist now.
“This is tremendously exciting,” James L. Green, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, said during a news conference on Monday. “We haven’t been able to answer the question, ‘Does life exist beyond Earth?’ But following the water is a critical element of that. We now have, I think, great opportunities in the right locations on Mars to thoroughly investigate that.”
The Times of India published “How NASA discovered flowing water on Mars—and what it means,” followed by “Water on Mars ‘could mean it has habitats for aliens.’” Similarly enthusiastic news reports appeared at US outlets associated with conservative views: Fox News online, the Washington Examiner , and the Wall Street Journal , which added to the excitement online with a video report and a set of photos .
But at the conservative Breitbart.com, a blurb accused NASA and the Obama administration of committing “cronyism” with “political pals” by contriving to time the Mars announcement to coincide with the release of the movie The Martian, which Breitbart described as “starring the left-wing Matt Damon.” Yahoo News has reported that NASA denies the charge.
Way more than a blurb came from the radio talk-show host and self-proclaimed conservative Rush Limbaugh. In lengthy comments on the air, he charged that “NASA has been corrupted by the current regime.” One passage from a transcript summarizes his general view of connections among the climate science of the red and blue planets and, roughly speaking, the climate politics of the red and blue states. Limbaugh alleged:
All this stuff is not based on any data whatsoever. It’s all based on computer models predicting things. This guy, Mr. Green, Jim Green at NASA, may be a perfectly nice guy, but, I’m sorry, the days where I listen to some scientist come out and say, “Yeah, two-thirds of Mars used to be covered with water and it was a mile deep,” because what comes next, he’s the director of planetary science at NASA, and he said, “After an unknown catastrophe, ‘Mars suffered a major climate change and lost its surface water.’”
Now, doesn’t that fit amazingly well with the scaremongering they are engaging in about planet Earth?
That page on Limbaugh’s website also contains an image of former vice president Al Gore portrayed as a Martian. Another transcript passage crystallizes Limbaugh’s accusation of scientific and political dishonesty:
What do you think they’re gonna do with this news? Look, the temperature data that has been reported by NASA has been made up, it’s fraudulent for however many years. There isn’t any warming. There hasn’t been for 18 and a half years and yet they’re lying about it. They’re just making up the amount of ice at the north and south poles. They’re making up the temperatures. They’re lying and making up false charts and so forth, so what’s to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?
Just as Limbaugh’s radio show gets widely heard, his views on the Mars water news have been widely reported, for example in a Newsweek posting implicating “Mars conspiracy ‘truthers.’”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.